Even When Things Go Wrong, Life Is Awesome

A few days ago I started getting sick. This sucks for two reasons. Firstly, I hate being sick. Secondly I hit the big 3-0 tomorrow and I don’t want to be ill on my birthday. I have been assured my many a wise onlooker that “being sick on your birthday is the ‘worst thing ever’“. Don’t want any of that, particularly as we have some friends coming over for a shindig.

To make matters worse, like many others who are also testing the current development branch of Ubuntu, life got very very wobbly a few days ago and many of us are strugging to boot, gain access to the network and get X up and running. This all decided to kick off the very day I started feeling wobbly myself.

I was not a happy bunny. Feeling like crap, broken computer and in the interests of resting and getting better, I had American television to contend with. Woe was mostly firmly pointed in my direction.

It was then I realized just how truly awesome life is, even within my (frankly not very bad) circumstances. On the illness front I had a comfortable bed to rest in and a loving wife who brought me chicken soup and tea laced with honey. On the television side I could bypass the rot and misfortune that is American telly and plonk a few DVDs on, in the form of the Mallrats 10th Anniversary edition, Zodiac and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

And then Ubuntu. I grabbed my Jaunty CD, booted into the Live CD and used my trusty 2GB Mandrake USB stick that I got at PyCon in Brum and installed Jaunty to it. I then set up links, some bookmarks, installed a few apps and I was back up and running while Scott, Lamont, Colin, Steve and others have worked to get the problem fixed in Karmic. Yesterday I sat back for a moment and just marvelled at how incredible free software is and how devoted the folks who make it are. The people who were trying to resolve this were up late into their nights working hard. We are blessed to have these folks in our lives.

So the moral of this story: at times life sucks, but it is in those moments it gives us a chance to step back and see all the wonderful things around us.

10 Comments

On the broken Karmic note, I was going nuts for a day. But after working with Scott today, I felt motivated enough to start the KDE upstart transition by writing/porting the kdm init script to an upstart script. All is working well again for us in KDE land 🙂

I feel you, bro. I’ve been contending with a serious back injury that’s been getting worse over the last couple of months, and finally caused me to have to bow out of a LoCo event I was going to hold tomorrow (first one I’ve had to skip, even with a bad back). So I’ve been sitting here pumped full of ever-increasing doses of codeine and valium, waiting to go into surgery and have a couple of disks removed next Wednesday. But, like you, despite it all at least I’ve got my family, my pets, my friends and well-oiled system dual booting Jaunty and Karmic sitting on my lap. Life could always be much, much worse.
Happy birthday, Jono, and welcome to the backside. It only get’s better from here!

I had just had a hard drive failure and my familiar old Hardy install (that was upgraded from Gutsy which was upgraded from Feisty) was kaput. So, I tried Karmic, but I ran into the same problems and I stepped back to Jaunty and gained a new appreciation for it,especially with the Balanzan theme in all of its rich and leathery goodness. My short time with Karmic was fun. Its looking good, but I no longer have a spare machine to play on, so Jaunty it its until Karmic’s beta.

Get well, and happy birthday. Its the 17th as I write this. Mine’s on Monday, so I guess that we were both products of a cold winter 😉

“To make matters worse, like many others who are also testing the current development branch of Ubuntu, life got very very wobbly a few days ago and many of us are strugging to boot, gain access to the network and get X up and running. This all decided to kick off the very day I started feeling wobbly myself.”

You know you work to much on the Ubuntu project, when the state of the software affects your health 😉

My Mandriva Flash has now had Mandriva, Fedora, various rescue-type distributions, and Microsoft Office on it. It’s a slut(*), but I still love it. =)

I quite like American TV, actually. I didn’t think I did at first – I was firmly convinced it was all crap and British TV was much better, until I went back to the U.K. for a visit after living here for a while and realized how shit most British TV actually is. There’s some good stuff, but way more bad stuff than you remember. Even things you remember being good tend to pale in comparison. Example – I used to love Morse and Frost (those ITV detective shows), but when I caught a few episodes back in the UK I realized how terrible most of the writing and supporting acting was. The lead actors are good, but the rest is pretty freaking terrible.

There’s lots of crap on American TV, too, of course – probably more just because there’s so many channels to fill – but if you add up all the good shows, I can think of rather more good American TV than good British TV, to be honest. The only things I can think of that British TV does better are alternative comedy (CYE is about the only decent home-grown American show in this category, the only other times American TV does it well is when they steal the premise from the UK – see The Office) and panel shows (which just don’t really exist on US TV – stuff like QI or Have I Got News For You). American drama, sitcoms, sports coverage, and ‘big event’ stuff like your Pop/American Idols and The Apprentice and all that crap are better.

Now, if you want REALLY bad TV, watch Canadian TV. Christ, there’s about three shows on CBC that I can bear watching for more than three minutes, and two of them are hockey. (The other’s The Hour).